Anton Hur

The pout of his thin lips provoked an urge to tease him with everything I had in my arsenal as well as a conflicting urge to give him everything in my heart, my world.

It is so difficult to try to say what I intend.

“Să vorbesc româneşte acum.”

“Bine, hai.”

“Cum te simţi azi?”

“Sunt bine. Mersi.”

Parents who destroy their children’s lives, who suck the life out of their children’s futures, not only for the sake of maintaining their own illusions but also to zealously expand them into the lives of their children—such parents can almost be understood from the perspective of obsession.

Following the words “Be grateful I raised you” is the implied clause “instead of killing you or leaving you for dead.” They probably mean it, too. My parents and their parents’ generations, after surviving the Korean War, had always, just like the generation that survived World War II, set their purpose not to live a human life but to have an animal’s instinct for survival.

For some people, their lives are ruled by one shocking event reverberating through their survival instincts.

Life shrinks into a trap made up of a shimmering moment in the past, a trap where they endlessly repeat that singular moment when they were surest of being alive.

Those who stare for too long at the sun are bound to go blind

The mouth was also a lipless slit. This slit was awkwardly opening and closing as it talked to her, its strained speech mixed with the gurgling of a person drowning, making it difficult to understand.

The head strained as it formed unpracticed speech with its lipless mouth. “My body was created with the things you dumped down the toilet, like your fallen-out hair and feces and toilet paper you used to wipe your behind.”